While organizations will leverage social media in various ways, summarized here are some opportunities for brand, advertising and customer service. Typically organizations monitor their brand health and adverting effectiveness by leveraging traditional market research. SAS Social Media Analytics helps you quickly identify threats to your brand, as well as opportunities, in real time. That intelligence can then arm you with the ability to refine your online ads (to capitalize on destinations on the web where favouritism towards your products and services is really strong, for example), or test out concepts to various online communities to elicit their input before retooling your approach. Online communities can provide valuable input to you to help you ensure successful roll-outs of your products and services and adverting. And for service… Often times our call centres become key barometers for impending customer issues. With social media analytics available to you in real-time you are able to establish reads on all aspects of your business and quickly identify when chatter is escalating beyond normal levels. This allows you to properly staff for such issues, prep call centre and web scripts, while reaching out and providing information online to counter negative public opinion. On the plus side, by listening in a purposeful way to the information out there on the social web, you are also able to isolate key consumer moments of truth regarding your market and align your energies to capitalize on this and engender greater loyalty and advocacy.

There are additional applications which can help firms from a pure public relations perspective as well as for market research.PR firms are no strangers to listening platforms, but SAS offers you the ability to take that a step further and pinpoint not only the issue in real time, but trace it back to the source (the medium and individual). This helps arm PR professionals with the tools to act – and to act smartly on the information that is out there affecting their brands. And lastly, with respect to market research… there are many applications that can help a business get real time reads on consumer opinion on a wide range of things which are important to your business – from your customer service, to your advertising, your products and services. SAS social Media Analytics can be a real time research portal for your business allowing you to gather essential market intelligence that helps you maintain a competitive edge and focus on things that matter to your customers and prospects.

The US military&apos;s high-tech research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), has put out a request for experts to look at &quot;a new science of social networks&quot; that would attempt to get ahead of the curve of events unfolding on new media.The program&apos;s goal was to track &quot;purposeful or deceptive messaging and misinformation&quot; in social networks and to pursue &quot;counter messaging of detected adversary influence operations,&quot; according to DARPA&apos;s request for proposals issued on July 14.The project echoes concerns among top military officers about the lightning pace of change in the Middle East, where social networks have served as an engine for protest against some longtime US allies.Some senior officers have spoken privately of the need to better track unrest revealed in social networks and to look for ways to shape outcomes in the Arab world through Twitter, Facebook or YouTube.&quot;Events of strategic as well as tactical importance to our Armed Forces are increasingly taking place in social media space,&quot; the DARPA announcement said.[what&apos;s this]&quot;We must, therefore, be aware of these events as they are happening and be in a position to defend ourselves within that space against adverse outcomes,&quot; it said.DARPA predicted that social networks would have a groundbreaking effect on warfare.&quot;Changes to the nature of conflict resulting from the use of social media are likely to be as profound as those resulting from previous communications revolutions,&quot; it said.Under the proposal, researchers would be expected to unearth and classify the &quot;formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes)&quot; in social media.The document cited a case in which authorities employed social media to head off a potential crisis, but did not specify details of the incident.&quot;For example, in one case rumours about the location of a certain individual began to spread in social media space and calls for storming the rumoured location reached a fever pitch,&quot; it said.DARPA planned to spend $42 million (£25m) on the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program, with prospective contractors asked to test algorithms through &quot;experiments&quot; with social media, it said.One possible experiment could involve a &quot;closed social media network&quot; of two to five thousand volunteers or an online role playing game with tens of thousands of players.

Global Pulse Briefing of UN General Assembly Being Webcast Live Desa PhiladelphiaNov 8, 2011 The Global Pulse team is briefing the United Nations General Assembly this afternoon at 2:45 pm EST on its Research Projects, Technology Toolkit, country-based Pulse Labs and its plans for the coming year. The briefing will also feature a keynote address by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.The briefing will feature the findings of research projects conducted in collaboration with some of the best data-research companies and institutions in the world, including Crimson Hexagon, Jana, PriceStats, SAS and a consortium of French centers and universities led by Complex Systems Institute of Paris Ile-de-France.The research projects include:Taking a Global Snapshot of Well-being through Mobile Phones. Tracking Commodity Prices by Monitoring Online Prices. Mining News for Emerging Trends.Understanding Unemployment through the Lens of Social Media. Twitter as a Barometer of Food Security Perception. The briefing will also highlight Global Pulse’s plans to develop in-country Pulse Labs around the world.

The objective of this project is to combine social media data with traditional data sources to better understand the experience of the unemployed in the United States and Ireland. In collaboration with SAS, this project will analyze conversations from the open social web for early signs of stress among the unemployed in order to better understand the coping strategies for unemployment. A secondary goal is the identification how the unemployed perceive their status-- for example whether they are optimistic or worried about the future.